The Magical Chorus

sabotaging the kolkhoz movement.”¹⁹

One of the literary bosses of those years, Vladimir Sutyrin, later recalled how he and Fadeyev, then editor-in- chief of Krasnaya Nov’, were brought late one evening in June 1931 to the Kremlin, to a Politburo meeting. Stalin, puffing on his pipe and holding a copy of Krasnaya Nov’, paced around the table, where Molotov, Voroshilov, Mikhail Kalinin, and other leaders of the country were seated. Stalin attacked Fadeyev when he was still in the door: “It was you who printed Platonov’s kulak anti-Soviet story?” Pale, Fadeyev replied that the issue had been prepared by the previous editor. That editor was brought to the Kremlin within a half hour, during which total silence reigned.

The former editor, face to face with Stalin, could barely stand up and babbled something incoherent in self- justification. Sweat poured down his face. Turning to his secretary, Poskrebyshev, Stalin said disdainfully: “Take him away…. Someone like that manages Soviet literature…. And you, comrade Sutyrin and comrade Fadeyev, take this magazine, it has my comments, and write an article that will expose the anti-Soviet meaning of Platonov’s story. You may go.”²⁰

A car brought Fadeyev and Sutyrin to the latter’s apartment, where they immediately wrote a strong anti- Platonov article, hastily published in the official newspaper Izvestiya and signed by Fadeyev. At the same time an entire series of brutal attacks against Platonov appeared in the press with such characteristic titles as “Lampoon on a Kolkhoz Village” and “More Attention to the Tactics of a Class Enemy.” They were also, without a doubt, instigated by Stalin. The authorities stopped publishing Platonov completely.

Yet Stalin did not execute Platonov. When he attended the famous meeting with writers at Gorky’s apartment on October 26, 1932 (it was then that Stalin called Soviet writers “engineers of the human soul”), his first question was “Is Platonov here?” No one had ever intended to invite “class enemy” Platonov to the literary summit, but after the ruler expressed interest in him, the writer’s life grew a little easier: they knew that Stalin did not pose random questions.

In 1933 a report from the secret police was placed on Stalin’s desk, with an account by an informer of how Platonov reacted to Stalin’s criticism of “Benefit.” “I don’t care what others will say. I wrote that novella for one man (for Comrade Stalin), that man read it and responded substantively. The rest does not interest me.” The same memorandum said that Platonov’s works were “characterized by a satiric and essentially counterrevolutionary approach to the basic problems of socialist construction,” but also noted that Platonov was “popular among writers and highly esteemed as a master,” and that he himself felt that his work “helps the Party see all the mold on some things better than the Worker-Peasant Inspection.”²¹

In literary circles, where many people knew Stalin’s wrathful reaction in 1931, Platonov was treated like a doomed man. But disaster befell Platonov from an unexpected side: on May 4, 1938, his son, Anton, barely sixteen, was arrested on the denunciation of a classmate (they were both in love with the same girl), and sentenced as a member of an “anti-Soviet youth terrorist organization” to exile in Siberia.

Sholokhov, an admirer of Platonov, offered to help the boy. According to Platonov, Sholokhov reached Stalin, who immediately asked for information by phone about Anton. The youth was returned to Moscow, his case was reviewed, his explanation that he confessed to terrorism “under threats of the prosecutor who said that if I did not sign my parents would be arrested” was accepted.²² Platonov’s son was one of the very few people for whom Stalinist justice went into reverse: on the eve of the war he was released. But Anton had contracted tuberculosis in prison and died on January 4, 1943, in the arms of his grief-stricken parents.

Despite all his misfortunes, Platonov was patriotic during the years of the war with Hitler. Lev Gumilevsky, a writer friend, recalled meeting Platonov in the fall of 1941 in one of the ubiquitous Moscow lines (this was for cigarettes), and Platonov expressed his firm conviction that Russia would win. “But how?” asked bewildered Gumilevsky. “How?…With their guts!” Platonov replied.²³

Although official historiography would like to convince us otherwise, such optimism was not shared by all in those tragic days. The literary scholar Leonid Timofeyev recorded in his secret diary (published only in 2002), the same day, October 16, 1941, that Tsvetaeva’s husband, Sergei Efron, was executed: “Apparently, it’s all over…. A defeat that will be hard to recover from. I can’t believe that they will manage to organize resistance somewhere. Thus, the world, apparently, will be united under the aegis of Hitler…. In the lines and in town there is a sharply hostile attitude regarding the ancien regime: they betrayed us, abandoned us, left us. The populace has started burning portraits of the leaders and the works of the church fathers.”²⁴ (Timofeyev meant the classics of Marxism.)

Platonov, moving through chaotic Moscow that day, noticed with his acute writer’s eye a collection of the works of Karl Marx left on the street by a frightened resident, neatly stacked on a clean cloth, and commented wryly to his companion, Gumilevsky: “Done by a decent man.”²⁵

The writer Vassily Grossman, later to write the great epic novel about the war and Stalin’s camps, Life and Fate, but during the war years in Stalin’s good favor, recommended Platonov as a war correspondent to the army newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. That was quite risky: Stalin read the paper every day, very attentively, often calling the editor with comments and criticism about the contents—he considered Krasnaya Zvezda an important instrument for the army’s political education. But Grossman’s plan worked: Platonov’s essays and stories began appearing regularly in the newspaper, to be followed by collections of his articles.

As the army newspaper’s editor recalled, he was very nervous: “I expected Stalin’s call every minute: who gave you permission to hire that ‘agent of the class enemy’ at Krasnaya Zvezda?” But the call never came, even though Stalin occasionally was vexed by Platonov’s “holy fool” style, and then Pravda would print irritated reviews that characterized his works as being “a heap of oddities.”²⁶

When the war ended in victory in May 1945, the tactical need to be tolerant of such talented but suspicious writers as Platonov disappeared. The final blow against Platonov came on January 4, 1947, when Literaturnaya Gazeta ran a big piece by one of the most vicious critics of those years, Vladimir Ermilov, titled “A. Platonov’s Slanderous Story,” with a categorical conclusion: “We are tired of the whole manner of ‘holy fool for Christ’ that characterizes A. Platonov’s writing…. The ugly andimpure little world of A. Platonov is repulsive and alien to the Soviet people.”²⁷

Platonov was ill in bed, the tuberculosis he had contracted from his son flaring up. He said bitterly to a friend who had come to visit him: “He knows I’m in bed, he’s kicking me when I’m down!” And as the newspaper with the merciless review fell from Platonov’s hands, “he shut his eyes, tears glistened.”²⁸

From that day, editors and publishers steadily rejected all of Platonov’s essays, stories, film scripts, and plays. We know that Sholokhov tried to help him even in those years; he got him scarce imported medicines. When Platonov died on January 5, 1951, he was fifty-one. In the history of modern Russian culture, full of warped lives and premature deaths, this was one of the greatest losses.

Chapter Nine

The war with Hitler, which brought the Soviet Union to the brink of collapse, demanded huge sacrifices from the entire country. Stalin, who was among the first political leaders of the century to appreciate the propaganda potential of culture, constructing a highly effective cultural apparatus even before the